Quotes from Charles Frazier

Our minds aren't made to hold on to the particulars of pain the way we do bliss. It's a gift God gives us, a sign of His care for us.

There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.

You never know when somebody will pull you to them.

If you're not who you want to be, at least act like who you want it be. - Bud

Mainly because people were what they were and you couldn't change them. most of the time, they couldn't change themselves, even if they were desperate to be somebody different from who they were. So, best keep your distance.

I consider it a mutual duty, that we owe to each other, to communicate in a spirit of the utmost frankness and candor. Let it ever be done with unlocked hearts.

When Ada disappeared into the trees, it was like a part of the richness of the world had gone with her. He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something better. -Cold Mountain

No looking back. Life goes one way only, and whatever opinions you hold about the past having nothing to do with anything but your own damn weakness. Nothing changes what already happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don't.

At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring.

she knew in her heart that nature has a preference for a particular order: parents die, then children die. But it was a harsh design, offering little relief from pain, for being in accord with it means that the fortunate find themselves orphaned.

But she couldn't dismiss easily his light touch with her. No pushing or pressing, none of that herding and corralling bullshit, unlike any of her old boyfriends. And maybe who you fell for and who you eventually loved wasn't rational, no matter how hard you tried to list pros and cons and sum the results. You couldn't think your way through it, not all the way. Maybe just the scent of somebody carried more weight than everything else put together.

If I had a brother in jail and one in Georgia, I'd try to bust the one out of Georgia first.

Surely it is a sin to reject the few gifts we are given. Be happy in the flash of time granted to us or hurt forever.

Take a king or a president or anybody. Put a heavy sack of gold in one hand and a feather-light declaration about freedom in the other. And then an outlaw sticks a pistol in his face and says give me one or the other. Every time—every ten out of ten —he'll hug the sack and throw away the ideals. Because the sack's what's behind the ideals, like the foundation under a building.

The man had asked, Why do you want sheep? The wool? Meat? Monroe's answer had been, For the atmosphere.

My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem.

A distressingly large portion of the world doesn't do you any good whatsoever.

What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the weak?

Nothing changes what already happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don't.

Needing and getting don't seem likely to match up any time soon... What needs doing is mine to do.

They were both at such an age that they stood on a cusp. They could think in one part of their minds that their whole lives stretched out before them without boundary or limit. At the same time another part guessed that youth was about over for them and what lay ahead was another country entirely, wherein the possibilities narrowed down moment by moment.

It's a good thing war is so terrible or else we'd get to liking it too much.

That's the way it is at some point in life. An inevitable consequence of living. A lot of things begin falling away.

the path to contentment was to abide by one's own nature and follow it's path.